In an effort to reduce excessive thumb-typing (resulting in Blackberry thumb), hardware designers are thinking outside of the PDA and creating "virtual keyboards". The key component is an imaging chip which stares at your fingers; when you tap the keyboard image projected on the surface below, the chip records a keystroke.

July 02, 2010

An acronym used in the software industry, you will see this term when you are installing new software and you must click on a radio button to "agree" or "disagree" with a program's legal notice. Turns out that if you click "disagree" the program usually will not install itself (so most people don't even read the EULA, they just click "agree"). We recommend reading the EULA over before you agree because some of these licensing agreements now contain important information about privacy and how the company uses your data.

July 03, 2010

Quite simply it is the act of copying data onto a CD-ROM. Most computers have a CD burner (also known as a CD-R drive) which allows you to "write" (or copy files) to a CD-ROM (commonly referred to only as a "CD"). It's easy to "burn a CD." You can copy a variety of files including audio, video, and data to for your later use and/or listening pleasure.

A term for new media moguls who seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us, "cloud capitalists" include Facebook, Apple, Google, and Twitter.

Historical perspective: According to Charles Leadbeater of the Edge, as of early 2010 these cloud capitalists are the new powers behind global cultural relations. "Their rise has sparked an increasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard led by Rupert Murdoch. This battle between old and new media powers however has distracted attention from the question of how these companies will organise cloud culture on our behalf. Elements of their business models resemble traditional public services: Google's work with a consortium of libraries around the world to digitise books that are out of copyright; ITunes U provides thousands of models of course material for free. However these companies are also businesses: they will want to organise the cloud to make money. By the end of the decade Google will have unprecedented control over literary culture, past, present and future. Leave aside issues of trust, privacy and security, commercial providers of cloud services will have strong incentives to manage their users to maximise revenues and so to discourage them from roaming from one service to another."

July 04, 2010

The paths a user takes as he or she navigates a Web page or cyberspace in general, it is the sequence of mouse clicks made by a user. Advertisers and online marketers have developed software that can track users' clickstreams. That way, they can deliver targeted ad banners based on what the user has clicked on in the past (presumably, this corresponds to the user's interests).

July 06, 2010

A cell phone-based technology that enables shoppers to buy an item by simply taking a picture of it. Once the photo is snapped, the service finds the same product online. Developed by Nokia, it is basically pointing your phone at real life objects and finding relevant information and services.

It means shoppers won't have to hassle with waiting in lines or even searching for desired goods online. It can also be used in other situations, such as tourist searches for landmarks. Way cool... MTF!

July 08, 2010

One of several safeguards for secure e-commerce and overall data transfer, a certificate authority is a third-party organization that creates digital certificates for a public key infrastructure (PKI). The certificate authority guarantees a user's identity and issues public and private "keys" for message encryption and decryption (coding and decoding). Essentially, the certificate authority guarantees that a user is the person he or she claims to be, and conversely, that the provider of the information is who the user believes he or she is accessing.

July 09, 2010

The final action of a computer-especially a mainframe-before it is shut down or "brought down" for good. The term comes from the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL sings the song "Daisy" as it is being shut down.

This phrase has morphed
and also refers to the end of an event, or project, or an era, such as
"It's time to sing daisy and get ready for a Happy New Year!"

The configuration is also at work in the software settings that allow various hardware components of a computer system to communicate with one another. A vanilla configuration means the standard "clean" and "no frills" version of a computer's configuration (no device drivers or extra settings). This is what a technician might set a system to when trying to troubleshoot a problem with a computer's hardware.

If you ever receive an e-mail message that says "can you please little "r" me?" it means to reply just to that person (and not to everyone that's cc'd on the list). Most commonly used at work where a bunch of people are included on an e-mail thread, this directive means to click the "Reply" option, not the "Reply to All" option.

July 11, 2010

A generic term for a system that stores, retrieves, and manages large amounts of data. Data warehouse software often includes sophisticated compression and hashing techniques for fast searches, as well as advanced filtering. Planners and researchers can use this database freely without worrying about slowing down the day-to-day operations of the production database, for example.

The shared intellectual space inhabited by bloggers (people who blog). It is actually more than the space, it is the community of bloggers itself and their collective voice. Blogs are increasing in popularity as a way for people to self-publish their insights on the Web and because of the free nature of this expression, they are transforming the way people and journalists work together to report, filter and break the news. One example of its usage is, "Reaction was swift in the blogosphere."

Because the term combines blog and biosphere, "blogosphere" captures the essense of Web logs as part of the media ecosystem. A second example of its usage is, "I've seen that link bouncing around the blogosphere lately." And a third usage example is, "It's hard to imagine working mothers making time to surf the blogosphere after work."

FYI: As of April 2006, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months and is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years prior. On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day, and the popular blog "Technorati" tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day (that's about 50,000 per hour).

July 13, 2010

Slang for a software version that has so many extra features, it takes up a large amount of space on your hard drive and slows down your computer system for no valuable reason. Sarcastic users will refer to the third release of a company's flagship product as bloatware.

July 14, 2010

Based on the suffix .com, this refers to a company in the industry (with a .com Web site) whose primary focus is on the financial aspects of taking the company public (versus addressing any real market need or establishing a successful, long-term business model). Activities such as IPOs and grabbing market share (by getting first-to-market) became mantras for many dot-com execs, ultimately leading to their downfall (see: new economy). While hundreds of dot-com companies are succeeding, it seems that since the dot-com shakeout, the phrase "dot-com" is used more often for the firms that ended up in the dot-com deadpool.

An example of its usage goes like this: "He met with plenty of young American dot-com executives overseas, and they simply weren't prepared to do international business. They were just hemming and hawing, trying to convince everyone else they'd succeed."

At work, it refers to doing what you're supposed to be doing, or rather, working exclusively on a necessary task. Another word for "focused," it used to be that in school, you'd get whacked on the knuckles any time you weren't "on task."

July 21, 2010

Similar to a real-life auction in which property or merchandise are sold to the highest bidder, an online auction takes place via a Web site, usually offering items for sale by the individual who owns them (C2C). For example, eBay is a popular auction site whose mission is to help anyone trade practically anything on earth. There are hundreds of online auction sites that on any given day list millions of items across thousands of categories, such as collectibles, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras, computers, furniture, sporting goods, tickets, and even automobiles and boats. There are also B2B auctions, B2C auctions, C2C auctions, and reverse auctions.

E-mail that is formatted using HTML, as opposed to plain text, so that graphics and links appear in the e-mail body. In order to see the format and images correctly, both the sender and the recipient must have an e-mail program that supports HTML e-mail (most e-mail programs do; otherwise, the message will have broken links or broken graphics).

The CKO is responsible for building and managing a company's internal knowledge management efforts - a system that organizes vital information from documents, databases, and people in a reusable and searchable body of institutional knowledge.

Sample salary: $100,000-$500,000.

July 24, 2010

A computer interface outlet (or plug) used to connect an external device, such as a printer (a peripheral). Most personal computers have a parallel port and at least one serial port. On PCs, the parallel port uses a 25-pin connector (type DB-25) and provides relatively high bandwidth to printers, computers, and other devices.

July 25, 2010

A device connected to your computer, used to reposition the cursor or move the pointer on your screen. It is equipped with control buttons, and you move it around on your mouse pad, next to your keyboard. With a mouse, you can highlight text, open menu items, or launch programs, for example.

A wooden prototype of the computer mouse was created by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute in 1963. The first commercially available mouse was made for the IBM-PC in 1982 by Mouse Systems. Mice are now available in serial and bus versions, and there is a wide range of styles and colors to choose from.

July 26, 2010

A relational database management system (RDBMS), the SQL server was designed for client/server use and is accessed by applications using SQL. It runs on OS/2, Windows NT, NetWare servers, VAXen, and Unixworkstations. Generically, it is any database management system (DBMS) that can respond to queries from client machines formatted in the SQL language. The term refers to either of two database management products from Sybase and Microsoft. Both companies offer client/server DBMS products called SQL Server.

A company's plan for cashing out of a venture. The two most common exit strategies in the industry are acquisition by a larger player or an IPO. Never before, it seems, has an exit strategy been so important.

July 27, 2010

A business measurement calculated by taking a year's worth of earnings and dividing it by the average shareholder's equity for that year. To calculate ROE, the earnings can be (1) taken directly from the Consolidated Statement of Earnings in the company's last annual filing with the SEC, (2) taken as the sum of the last four quarters' worth of earnings, (3) figured using the average of the last five or ten years' earnings, or (4) annualized, based on the last quarter's results.

July 30, 2010

The loss of human resources, especially of knowledge workers. For example, when someone leaves a third-world country, moves to America for training and education, but then does not move back to his or her home country to share the knowledge, the country suffers a brain drain. This can also happen within a company.

The process of redirecting your incoming mail to a different mailbox. For example, if you have a number of e-mailaddresses, you can have them forwarded to a single mailbox. This makes it easier to retrieve and manage your messages.

July 31, 2010

A two-way interaction in a client/server environment, in which the user interface is stored in the client and the data is stored in the server. The application logic can be in either the client or the server.

A tarnished use of a noun in the "computer architecture" world. "Give us the guidelines and expectations you have for your system and we'll architect it for you." Perhaps a more common or logical alternative to this term would be "design". See: information architect